Almost every small business has a job that exists only because two systems refuse to talk to each other. Someone copies orders out of an inbox into a spreadsheet. Someone re-types invoice numbers into the accounts package on a Friday afternoon. Nobody chose this. It accumulated, one tool at a time, and now it costs you a day a week.
The test is simple. If a person follows the same steps every time, and those steps never require judgement, a computer should be doing it. If the steps change depending on circumstances, automation still helps, it just needs the rules written down first, which is often the genuinely useful part of the exercise.
If Zapier or Make can do the job for twenty pounds a month, we will tell you that and help you set it up rather than quoting for a build. That is a smaller invoice for us and the right answer for you.
Custom code earns its place when the volume makes per-task pricing absurd, when the logic is too specific for a template, or when the data is sensitive enough that you do not want it passing through a third party. Then we write something small, hosted on Cloudflare Workers, that costs pennies a month to run and does exactly one job reliably.
Either way it is monitored. An automation that fails silently is worse than no automation, because you stop checking.
Before quoting, we work out what the manual version costs you now. Take the hours, multiply by what that person's time is worth, annualise it. If the automation costs more than eighteen months of that, it is usually not worth building, and we will say so on the call rather than after the invoice.
The saving is rarely just the hours. It is the orders that stop being missed, the invoices that stop being paid late, and the fact that the process no longer breaks when one person is on holiday.
We sit with whoever does the job now, in person if you are nearby, and write down every step including the exceptions they have stopped noticing.
What the manual version costs a year against what replacing it costs once. If the numbers do not work, we tell you.
The automation runs alongside the manual process for a fortnight so you can compare outputs before trusting it.
Failure notifications go to a person, not a log file nobody reads. You get documentation on what to do when something breaks.
We are based in Cheshire and a good share of our clients are within an hour of us: Chester, Warrington, Northwich, Macclesfield, Crewe, and across into Manchester and Liverpool. That matters less than it once did, because most of the work happens over video calls and a shared staging link. It does mean we can spend a morning in your office at the start of a project watching how the current process really works, which is usually where the requirements you did not think to mention turn up.
We work with businesses anywhere in the UK. If you are further away, nothing about the process changes except that the first meeting is on a screen.
A single integration between two systems is often a few hundred pounds. A multi-step workflow with its own logic and error handling is usually one to four thousand. We cost it against what the manual version is costing you a year, and tell you if the maths does not work.
Almost never in a business this size. What it usually replaces is the worst two hours of somebody's week, the part they were doing badly because it was tedious. The people stay, the retyping goes.
It will, eventually, because an API somewhere will change. Everything we build sends a notification to a named person when a run fails, with enough detail to act on. Retainer clients get the fix included.
Usually. If it has an API we can work with it. If it does not but it can export a file on a schedule, we can generally work with that too. If it can do neither, we will tell you early rather than after taking a deposit.
No, and we would rather you did not. Migrations are expensive and disruptive. The point is to make what you have work together, not to sell you a new system.